


XIII. Broken

by notablyindigo



Series: The Better Half [13]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, assault cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-21 07:05:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1541969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notablyindigo/pseuds/notablyindigo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>You’re a little bit broken, I’m a sucker for that<br/>So in the moment I lost you, I wanted you back.<br/>But that’s a feeling that’s fading, and I’m closing the door.<br/>And all that I felt then, I don’t feel it anymore.<br/>- ‘Broken’ by Lauren Hoffman</p>
    </blockquote>





	XIII. Broken

**Author's Note:**

> You’re a little bit broken, I’m a sucker for that  
> So in the moment I lost you, I wanted you back.  
> But that’s a feeling that’s fading, and I’m closing the door.  
> And all that I felt then, I don’t feel it anymore.  
> \- ‘Broken’ by Lauren Hoffman

Joan has a problem with inertia. 

When Dr. Reed presents her with this assessment, after over a year and a half of therapy, it doesn’t come as much at all of a revelation. Joan begins, at that point, to wonder what, exactly, the doctor’s exorbitant bills are paying for. 

"You need a change of pace. To move on to something else." Dr. Reed pauses to make a notation on her notepad. "Perhaps a change in profession." It is here that she begins, at last, to earn her keep. 

Sober companionship seems like a revelation at first, but within the first month Joan discovers it for the easy solution that it is. Familiar, tangible, binary. No shades of gray here. The categories are clear: safe, or unsafe; using, or not. She’s good at her job. She still gets to…how did Sherlock put it? Rebuild lives from the ground up? 

Oftentimes, that feels too grand an attribution—she’s spent too many nights in ER waiting rooms, too many hours on the phone with devastated family members, for her work to feel that kind of clean. But at least she doesn’t freeze up while sitting next to clients in AA meetings. At least her hands don’t shake when she administers drug swabs. That has to be counted for something, doesn’t it? 

She’s a sober companion for three years before taking on the Holmes case. Three years and twenty clients, each of them fascinating in their own way. And yet, as soon as she meets Sherlock, there is an immediate attraction. Not to him (certainly not to him, all wide staring eyes and frenetic motion, too rough and too impulsive for her taste), but to his work. His world, even. There’s something to the view from behind the glass in an interrogation room that Joan finds…well, with only seven weeks between her and her next client, it hardly bears mentioning. 

Or, it hardly bears mentioning until, of course, it’s suddenly the only thing worth talking about. She has to bite her tongue on the phone with her mother. Confidentiality, she reminds herself. She gives tight-lipped smiles over coffee with Em and chants the word in her mind like a mantra. 

Her tendency to settle into things, to places, and to stay there long after they’ve lost their capacity for comfort, has never really been to her credit, much as she’s tried to convince herself that it is. It’s one thing to be adaptive, and another to be complacent. Joan has the properties of a liquid, changing shape to suit the contours of new containers. But she has to be poured first, displaced from one circumstance to another. In spite of all the mess, she would’ve stayed with Liam if he hadn’t left. Without Mr. Castoro’s nicked vena cava, she might still be scrubbing into surgeries she only vaguely cared about. Even the old rent-controlled apartment in Park Slope had remained in her orbit until her tenant’s…extracurriculars mandated its expulsion. 

Joan knows about herself that, given the opportunity, she’ll make do. This is what Dr. Reed still hasn’t figured out: Joan’s real problem is tolerance. A body at rest will stay at rest, but that’s never been the issue. It takes a cataclysm of an outside force to change her course of motion.

She can’t stop herself from the deductions, from absorbing residues of Sherlock’s work. She may not be a doctor anymore, but as Sherlock so loves to remind her, she was a doctor, and so the data assimilation, the noting of masked details, the wielding of Occam’s Razor falls back around her like an old coat. She finds that the puzzle pieces of a case fit better, more comfortably, in her mind than the scalpel ever did in her hand. I’m not a detective, she reminds herself, but she sinks her teeth into the Russian spy case anyway, ordering x-rays and building a collage of her own when, in spite of everything, she decides to go to bat for Carly Purcell. 

"It’s a lovely homage to my method," Sherlock says, regarding the spread of photographs and evidence she’s assembled in front of the fireplace. Joan thinks of long evenings spent in the hospital, charts and scans and anatomy atlases laid out in front of her. She hooks a forkful of spaghetti out of the mug she’s holding and decides not to mention that it’s her method, too. 

It feels good, solving cases. Good, and familiar, like a cleanly healed incision or a successful rehab. It’s when she meets Aaron—when she has to limp her way through an explanation of how, precisely, she found out about his green card marriage—that she begins to understand that this life has consequences. She is, metaphorically at least, slow to react. It’s only months later, as she’s striking an armed intruder over the head with a phrenology bust, that she comes to realize that loneliness isn’t the only danger here.

People find their paths in the strangest of ways, her mother says, and where usually she would find this to be a fairly banal statement, Joan instead carries the words around in her pocket. She finds herself pondering phase-shift diagrams, that curved line at low temperature and pressure where ice makes the surprising jump directly into vapor, and thinks that change can happen where you least expect it.

Be my partner, he asks, and she jumps in with both feet.

When Joan tells Dr. Reed of her decision, she congratulates her and calls it steps in the right direction. She calls it progress, and Joan agrees. 

A year later, when she comes to and finds herself groggy and zip-tied to a chair in a warehouse, she thinks that perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate.


End file.
